The Knight

Chapter 63. The Plain Of Jotunland

Night had fallen before we reached the Angrborn’s camp; but it lay upon the bank of a wooded stream, and the fire they had built there—a fire of whole trees, some so thick through the trunk that a man with an ax would not have felled them after an hour’s hard work—lit all the countryside. Two mules turned on spits above that fire.

I had taken off helmet and hauberk and crept far into the firelight to see the Angrborn for myself. When I got back to the woods where Uri, Baki, and Gylf were waiting, I had already formed a plan.

“There are only seven.” I seated myself upon a log I could only just see. “We argued about their number, and everybody thought there were more.”

“In that case you will not need our help,” Uri declared. “A mere seven giants? Why, you and your dog will have put an end to them before breakfast.”

“Won’t you fight them?”

Uri shook her head.

“You and Baki fought the Mountain Men.”

“We distracted them, mostly, so that you could fight them.”

“We are really not very good at fighting on this level, Lord.” Baki would not meet my eyes.

“Because they used to be your gods?”

Baki sighed, a ghostly whisper in the darkness beneath the trees. “You were our gods, Lord. They never were.”

“We could appear in their fire,” Uri suggested, “if you think it would do any good.”

“But the giants are not afraid of us,” Baki added. “They would order us out, and we would have to go.”

“If they did nothing worse, Lord.”

Gylf growled.

“Then you’re not willing to help us? If that’s how matters stand, you might as well go back to Aelfrice.”

“We will if you order it, Lord,” Uri told me, “but we would rather not.”

I was disgusted. “Tell me why I ought to keep you.”

“Be reasonable, Lord.” Uri edged toward me until her hip pressed mine; her hip was as warm and as soft as that of any human woman. “You yourself did not wish to fight them until you had rescued your servant—”

“Mate, too,” Gylf added.

“From Utgard. Suppose we fought, all four of us. Baki and I, who can achieve next to nothing, and you and your dog. What would be the upshot? We would be killed, or more likely you and your dog would be, while Baki and I would have to flee to Aelfrice or die.”

She stopped, inviting me to speak; I did not.

“What would be the good of that? A dead giant? Two? None, if you trust my judgment. A knight and a dog to feed the crows. Let us delay them, instead. Is that not what we set out to do?”

Ten minutes later, crawling through high grass toward a group of tethered mules, I found myself thinking that what I was doing was probably more dangerous than fighting. Every move I made rustled the grass; and if the Angrborn had not heard me, the mules tied to the gnarled birch I was creeping up on certainly had. They were pretty easy to see because of the firelight; their ears were up and forward, and their heads high. Their nervous stamping sounded louder than the purling of the stream. It seemed that the Angrborn must certainly hear it, and it struck me when I was very close that mules could kick and bite as well as or better than horses. They thought something was about to attack them, and they were by no means defenseless.

“Those Frost Giants are cooking a couple of you this very minute,” I whispered.

Mani had said once that a few animals could speak; I had not believed him then and did not believe him now, but it was at least possible that he had been truthful.

“You’re supposed to be sensible animals. Don’t you want to get away from here?”

I had continued to crawl while I talked; now a rope touched my cheek. I drew my dagger and cut it and heard a little snort of satisfaction from the mule whose tether it had been.

Then I was at the tree and dared stand up, keeping the trunk between me and the fire. My dagger was good and sharp, but the tethers were tough; I was still sawing at them when a loose mule wandered by. With a sort of overwrought absentmindedness, I wondered whether it was one I had freed or one freed by Uri or Baki.

The tether I had been cutting parted, and I found the next one.

There was a rumble of angry voices, deep and loud, from the direction of the fire. One of the Angrborn stood up, another shouted, and a third snarled. I slashed at the tough tethers frantically.

Half a bowshot off, a mule crossed a patch of moonlight, galloping clumsily but fast, urged on by an Aelfmaiden lying like a red shadow on its back.

Another tether parted. Nearly dropping my dagger, I searched the trunk for more, but every one I found hung limp. Three Angrborn had left the fire and were walking toward me by that time, two shoulder-to-shoulder, the third lagging behind.

“Gylf!” I shouted. “Gylf!”

The bay of a hound on the scent answered me; in a moment that seemed long, it became the excited yelp of a hound with its prey in view. Somewhere a mule screamed, a stark cry of animal terror, and a dozen scattered in every direction. One of the giants dove for one as a man my size might have dived at a runaway goat, but it slipped through his hands. For a moment he held its tail; it kicked at his arm and vanished into the darkness.

The black beast that had killed so many Mice sprang at the throat of another Angrborn. Arms thicker than any man’s body closed around it.

“Disiri!” I ran to the fight. The third Angrborn was lumbering toward me when a mule with a crimson shadow on its back dashed in front of him, and he tripped and fell.

An Angrborn rolled toward me, wrestling a creature that was neither hound nor wolf, an animal far larger than a lion. Like a boulder tossed by a wave, Sword Breaker’s hard-edged, diamond-shaped blade struck and struck again. Without time or preparation that I could recall afterward, I found myself astride the ravening beast I had fought to save, and racing like the wind across the hills.

I felt I rode a storm.

Before the sun rose, Gylf had dwindled to his ordinary size; and not too long afterward, he and I found the white stallion where I had tied it the night before. Instead of mounting, I untied it and took off its saddle.

“You’re tired,” Gylf commented. “You want to sleep. I’ll watch.”

“I am tired,” I conceded, “but I don’t want to sleep and don’t intend to. I want to talk.”

“I’ll go.”

“I don’t want you to go. You’re mine, assuming that the Bodachan had a valid claim on you, and I like you very, very much and want to keep you. But there are things I’ve got to know.”

“I scare you.”

“You’d scare anybody.” Finding no log or stone to sit on, I sat in fern not far from the edge of the water.

“I’ll go.”

“I said I don’t want you to. I don’t even want you to hunt up a rabbit for us. We’re still too near those Frost Giants for that. I want you to tell me what you are.”

“Dog.” Gylf sat too.

“No ordinary dog can do what you do. No ordinary dog can talk, for that matter.”

“Good dog.”

I groped for some way to frame a question that might get a useful answer but had to settle for, “Why is it you get big when you fight something at night?”

“’Cause I can.”

“When we got Mani, I wanted to think you were like him.”

Gylf growled.

“Okay, maybe I should’ve said I wanted to think he was like you, only a cat. That’s how it seemed lots of times, but I’m pretty sure it’s wrong.”

Gylf lay down and offered no comment.

“Mani knows a lot about magic from watching the witch who used to own him. You don’t know anything about magic, so what you do isn’t. I don’t know what it is but I know I need to think about it. Unless you tell me.”

“Can’t.”

“Then maybe Uri can. Or Baki.” I called for them, but neither appeared.

“That’s not good,” I said. “We’ve got to go to Utgard to get Pouk and Ulfa, and get back before Lord Beel’s bunch gets here. We’re going to need Uri and Baki but we may not have them.”

Gylf raised his head. “Think they know? Might know?”

“They might,” I said, “and they might even tell us. The Aelf can change shape.” I paused to think. “Only not in the sunshine. But in Aelfrice, Setr changed into a man called Garsecg, and Uri and Baki had been turned into Khimairas. Or maybe turned themselves into Khimairas. I don’t know which.”

Seeing Gylf’s look of incomprehension, I added, “Flying monsters. Only there’s something wrong about all this. I can’t put my finger on it, but I know there is.”

“Sleep,” Gylf suggested.

I shrugged. “You’re right. I need sleep, and if I sleep I might think of it. Only just ’til dark, all right? Wake me when it starts to get dark, if you’re awake.”

It was dangerous, I thought as I stretched myself on the cool fern. We were within a few miles of the Angrborn camp; if they searched the woods for the mules, they might find us. More likely, the white stallion might be seen and caught and used for a pack horse. But pushing myself, and the stallion, and even Gylf to the point of exhaustion would be worse yet; and the lands nearer Utgard, from what I had been told, would have a lot more giants living in them than this dry hill country did.

As sleep came nearer and nearer, I tried to imagine one of the Angrborn plowing with oxen the way one of our farmers would with a toy tractor. Try as I might, I could not do it.

Water surged about me, carrying me with it. A school of fish like scarlet jewels passed, and met a second school of iridescent silver. They intermeshed, passed. The iridescent fish surrounded me, and were gone.

The girl-face of Kulili lay below me as an island must lie below a bird. Her vast lips moved, but the only sound was in my mind. I made them. I shaped them as a woman molds dough, taking something from the trees, something from the beasts that felled the trees, and something from myself.

I saw her hands then, hands knit of a million millions of thread-worms, and Disiri taking shape as they labored.

That dream was lost among other many others, dreams of death, long before my eyelids fluttered.

But not lost completely.

I woke at sunset, and in less than an hour I was riding north, with Gylf trotting beside the stallion. About the time the moon came up, I said, “I think I’ve got it. Not everything, but a lot of the things that were bothering me.”

Gylf glanced up. “About me?”

“Other stuff, too. I was thinking you only changed at night.”

“Mostly.”

“Yeah, mostly. But not always. Not when you and me and old man Toug fought the outlaws, for instance.”

We went on in silence, the stallion picking his way through the darkness as the moon through the cold sky.

“Do you remember your mother, Gylf? Do you recall her at all?”

“How she smelled.”

“You got separated from her, somehow. Do you remember anything about that?”

“Wasn’t to go.” Gylf’s deep voice sounded thoughtful. “Went anyhow.”

I thought of little kids at home. “You wandered off?”

“Couldn’t keep up. Brown people found me.”

“The Bodachan.”

He grunted assent.

“They bowed to me when they gave you to me. Remember? They tried to hide their faces.”

“Yep.”

“I think somebody in Aelfrice educated me, Gylf. I feel like I was taught a lot there. But I don’t know why, or what I learned.”

“Huh!”

“I don’t even know if I really learned it. Only I think the Bodachan educated you. Trained you, or whatever you’re supposed to say about that. Taught you to talk, maybe. And I think probably they told you about changing shape, how to do it, and you shouldn’t do it in the sunshine, not here in Mythgarthr.”

“Pigs.”

I reined up. “What did you say?”

“Pigs. Smell ’em?”

“Do you think they’re close?” I strained to look about me in the darkness, and sensed rather than saw that Gylf had lifted his head to sniff the wind.

“Nope.”

“We might as well go on,” I decided after a minute or two. “If we can’t ride through this country at night, we sure can’t ride through it in the daytime.”

When we had topped the next hill, Gylf remarked, “Like ’em.”

“The pigs?” I had been lost in my own thoughts.

“Aelf.”

“They were good to you then. I’m glad.”

“You, too.”

“You’ve had a rough time of it with me.”

“Just once.”

“In the boat?”

“In the cave.”

I rode in silence after that. There was a nightingale singing in the trees beside the river, and I found myself wondering why a bird that would be welcomed wherever it went would choose to live in Jotunland. It made me remember how I had stayed at the cabin so I would not get in your way. I had not minded it, and in fact I had liked it a lot; and that made me realize that I liked being by myself out there in Jotunland, too. People are all right, and in fact some are truly good; but you do not see the Valfather’s castle when you are with them.

Besides, it was good to be alone with Gylf again. He had been right about the forest, and I had not thought nearly enough about that while it was happening. I thought a lot then about how he had gotten bigger, and about riding on his back instead of the stallion’s. He was a big, big dog even when he was small, because it was the smallest he could make himself. If he could have, he would have been puppy-sized, like Mrs. Cohn’s Ming Toy. It seemed to me a dog—a big dog like Gylf—was the best company anybody could have.

I tried to think about who I would rather have with me than Gylf. Disiri, if she would love me. But what if she wouldn’t? Disiri was wonderful, sure, but she was hard and dangerous, too. She would not be with me again until I found Eterne, and maybe not then. I thought that if she felt about me the way I felt about her, she would stick with me every second.

Garvaon would have been all right, but no Garvaon was better, because he was really Setr. Idnn would have been a terrible worry. Pouk would not have been bad. He would have wanted to talk, and I would have had to shut him up—but I knew how to do that.

Finally I hit on Bold Berthold. He would have been perfect, and as soon as I thought of him, I missed him a lot. He had never been right the whole time I had known him, because of the way one side of his head was pushed in. He forgot things he should have remembered, and most of the time he walked like he was drunk. But when you were around him a lot you could see the person he had been, the man who had wrestled bulls, and there was an awful lot of that left. There had been no school where he grew up, but his mother had taught him. He knew a lot about farming and woodcraft, and about the Aelf, too. I had never asked him what I was supposed to say when I spoke for them, and now it was too late. But I felt like he might have known. Bold Berthold would have been perfect.

Ravd would have been wonderful too. Why did the best people I met have to die? That got me thinking about his broken sword—how I had picked it up and put it down again, and cried, and I thought that cave, where we had found Ravd’s broken sword, must have been the one Gylf meant. At last I said, “We’ve never been in a cave, except for the cave where the outlaws hid their loot, and we weren’t in there long. Were you thinking of the cable tier? That was pretty bad for both of us.”

“Just me,” Gylf explained. “You weren’t there.”

“Garsecg’s cave? I heard something about that. You were chained up in there?”

“Yep.”

So Garsecg had chained Gylf up like the Angrborn had, and for a while I wondered why Gylf had let either one of them do it. Finally I saw that he did not like to change into what he really was. He did it when he had to fight, but he would rather let somebody chain him up than change.

“Garsecg’s cave brings us back to shapechanging,” I said, “and your shape does change, but mostly you get bigger. Garsecg told me once that though the Aelf could change their shapes, they were always the same size.”

“No good.”

“Oh, I’m sure it can be nice. Uri and Baki can take flying shapes, and I’d love to be able to do that. But if it’s true, it isn’t what you do. We’re looking at different things that only seem to be about the same.”

I searched for an analogy. “When I first left the ship with Garsecg, there were these Kelpies, Sea Aelf, all around me. I was afraid I’d drown, and they said not to be afraid, that I couldn’t drown as long as I was with them.”

Gylf raised his head again, sniffing the wind.

“Later it was just Garsecg and me, but I still didn’t drown. After that, I dove into a pool on Glas. It went down into the sea, the sea of Aelfrice, and I was alone under the water until I found Kulili, but I still didn’t drown.”

“See the hedgerow?” Gylf inquired.

“I see a long, dark line,” I said. “I’ve been wondering if it was a wall.”

“Somebody’s in it.”

I loosened Sword Breaker in her scabbard. “I think the best thing might be to pretend we don’t know he’s there for a while yet. When we’re closer, you might have a look at him.”

“Right.”

“What I was trying to say is that the Kelpies probably could protect people who were with them, but that wasn’t what was protecting me. What was protecting me was something I’d picked up when I was first in Aelfrice, something that looked the same ’til you looked close.”

“Huh!”

“So you don’t change like the Aelf change. Disiri’s tall and slim, but when we were alone—it was in a cave, but you weren’t with me then at all—she made herself, you know, rounder.” My cheeks burned, thinking about it. “And that was nice. Only she had to be shorter, too, to do it. Is there just one person in the hedge?”

“Badger, too.”

“But just one human?”

Gylf sniffed again. “Think so.”

“I told Garsecg about Disiri, how she had to be shorter to be rounder. But I should have thought about him. He turned himself into a dragon, and the dragon was a lot bigger than he was. He made himself look like me, too, although I’m bigger than he was. Could you make yourself look like me?”

“Nope.”

“Could you be that really big thing you are sometimes? Right now?”

Gylf grew. His eyes blazed like coals, and fangs two feet long pushed his lips apart. A moan of fear, faint but not too faint to hear, came from the hedgerow, and he bounded away. I urged my stallion after him.